/ world today news/ On Friday, the Biden administration said it would send cluster munitions — weapons that scatter unexploded bombs over a wide area, killing and maiming civilians for decades — to Ukraine.
Faced with the failure of Kiev’s military offensive, the United States is desperate to provide increasingly destructive and indiscriminate weapons to reverse its failures on the battlefield.
Critically, the announcement comes ahead of next week’s NATO summit in Vilnius, where the US and NATO plan to massively expand their involvement in the war. Backed into a corner by its miscalculation, the Biden administration is forced to take even more drastic measures.
The purpose of the decision to use cluster bombs – regardless of the long-term impact on civilians – is to kill as many Russian soldiers as possible. The motivations that led to the use of Agent Orange and napalm in the past, and which will be used for the use of tactical nuclear weapons, are currently at work.
The US, on the eve of Vilnius, is clearly sending a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin. NATO will stop at nothing.
At a briefing on Friday announcing the move, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan justified the decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine as a means of preventing a military catastrophe.
“There is also a huge risk of civilian casualties if Russian troops and tanks go through Ukrainian positions and take more Ukrainian territory and subjugate more Ukrainian civilians because Ukraine does not have enough artillery.”
Sullivan made the announcement just over a month after Ukraine launched its spring offensive, which the US press had touted as “the final solution for Ukraine”, leading, in the words of retired general David Petraeus, to “significant breakthroughs”.
Instead, the offensive resulted in a bloody failure. Far from inflicting a crushing defeat on Russia, the Biden administration has been forced into one escalating move after another in an effort to prop up the Ukrainian military.
“We recognize that cluster munitions pose a risk of injury to civilians from unexploded ordnance,” Sullivan said. “But we had to balance that against the risk” that Ukraine might “not have enough artillery ammunition.”
In other words, the Biden administration weighed the cost of killing and maiming generations of Ukrainian civilians against the benefits of killing more Russian soldiers. He decided that the deaths of Ukrainian children from unexploded ordnance was a sacrifice the American oligarchy was willing to make.
Managing to outdo himself in total insensitivity, Sullivan added that Ukraine would have to be “mined no matter what.”
Any line used by the White House to justify sending these weapons of terror to Ukraine could be used to justify the deployment or even use of tactical nuclear weapons in the conflict. Yes, the White House says, nuclear waste poses a risk to civilians, but that risk must be “balanced” against the risk of Russian military advances.
The deployment of US tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine has already been directly raised by a US think tank. Furthermore, the deployment and possible use of nuclear weapons in the conflict will no doubt be on the agenda of the upcoming summit in Vilnius.
Every official statement by the US about its involvement in the war is justified by the fact that it is once again “saving” a country through military violence – this time Ukraine. But by sending cluster bombs and depleted uranium weapons into Ukraine, the United States has made it clear that this is nothing more than a hollow pretext to pursue its goal of outdoing Russia and China in the “great power competition.”
The very words used by the United States and its allies to condemn Russia’s alleged use of cluster bombs in Ukraine now apply squarely to the US decision to send those weapons to Ukraine.
In February 2022, US UN envoy Linda Thomas-Greenfield accused Russia of using “cluster munitions” in Ukraine, “which are banned under the Geneva Convention” and “have no place on the battlefield”.
In March 2022, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said: “We have seen the use of cluster bombs, which is in violation of international law.” He added: “We also need to make sure that the International Criminal Court does look into this.”
In fact, all these condemnations of Russian actions by the US and NATO were just hypocritical pretexts for escalating US involvement in the war.
The US decision to send cluster bombs into Ukraine exposes all pseudo-left defenders of US intervention in the Ukraine war, including those of the Democratic Socialists of America who decry “preemptive hostility to US imperialism”, as shameless apologists for the US military’s war crimes.
In fact, the US-led war against Russia in Ukraine is a war for American global hegemony, in which Ukrainians are mere cannon fodder. This is entirely consistent with the series of criminal wars of aggression waged by the US over the past half century.
During the Vietnam War, the US dropped an estimated 413,130 tons of cluster bombs in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Many of these submunitions failed to explode on impact and continue to pose a significant threat to the civilian population, resulting in countless injuries and deaths decades after the end of the war.
During the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US regularly used cluster munitions to attack civilian areas in what Amnesty International called an “indiscriminate attack and a grave violation of international humanitarian law”.
In Iraq, the devastation of cluster bombs was compounded by the use of depleted uranium munitions, which one study found led people around Fallujah to higher rates of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality and sex mutations than those seen among Hiroshima survivors and Nagasaki in the years after those Japanese cities were incinerated by American atomic bombs in 1945.
During the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, cluster bombs killed and wounded hundreds of civilians and littered the countryside with deadly unexploded ordnance. The United States has been implicated in the use of cluster munitions through its support for Saudi-led forces in the conflict in Yemen.
More than 110 countries have ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which prohibits their use, transfer and stockpiling. The United States, which has killed more people with cluster munitions than any other country, has not signed.
A 2008 UN report explained the devastating impact of cluster munitions on populations where they are used by the US and its allies:
“More than three decades after cluster munitions were used in Laos and Vietnam, they continue to cause death and injury, disrupt the economic activities of ordinary people and impede the implementation of development projects there. Even rapid, large-scale clean-up efforts, such as those implemented in Kosovo and Lebanon, cannot prevent the impact of cluster munition contamination. In Kosovo, civilian casualties from cluster munitions are still reported, and in Lebanon, although clearance began immediately after the 2006 conflict, it could not prevent casualties among the population as they returned to their homes and livelihoods.”
The report continues:
“Submunitions can prevent or impede the safe return of refugees and internally displaced persons and hamper humanitarian, peace-building and development efforts. Unexploded cluster munitions also pose a physical threat to aid workers and peacekeepers.”
The White House says it discussed and considered the move with the utmost care. Decision makers would have been fully informed of these known consequences of cluster munitions and proceeded with them regardless.
Reporting on Biden’s decision to send the weapons, the New York Times wrote: “Mr. Biden has been under constant pressure from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has argued that the munitions — which scatter small, deadly bombs — are the best way to kill Russians who are dug in and blocking Ukraine’s counteroffensive to retake territory.”
Zelensky’s role in making the decision to send weapons that will maim Ukrainian children for generations sums up the role of his government, which serves as a tool to impose the will of NATO forces on the Ukrainian population.
This latest escalation by the United States should be seen as a warning. Washington will stop at nothing to prevent further military setbacks for its puppet forces in Kiev and to achieve its military objective of strategically defeating Russia. The same murderous logic that justifies the deployment of depleted uranium projectiles and cluster bombs will be used to justify even greater and more reckless crimes, from NATO’s direct entry into war to the deployment and use of nuclear weapons.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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